By Noah Rothman
Friday, July 07, 2023
Writing in the Daily Beast, former Clinton administration official and editor of Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf, asks a good question: Why is it that the West has gotten Vladimir Putin “and the nature of the threat he poses so wrong?” It is a pity that the answer he posits is so unsatisfying.
Rothkopf locates the origins of the West’s misapprehensions about Putin and the attenuated superpower he led in 2001, when George W. Bush infamously concluded that the Russian leader was “straightforward and trustworthy” after he gazed into the future autocrat’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul.” From there, we gloss over 16 years of clarifying history and jump to 2017 and Donald Trump’s rhetorical infatuation with Russia’s president. But the interim years over which Rothkopf glides have more to teach us than that.
Every American president since the collapse of Soviet communism has argued in some fashion that his predecessor’s misunderstanding of the real Russia was the cause of an undesirable status quo. Every president since George H. W. Bush has engineered a Russian “reset,” though only one called it that. George W. Bush’s inadvisable “sense of his soul” comment was purely aspirational since Putin had only taken office 13 months earlier. But to the extent it reflected policy in Bush’s first term, it was based on the assumption that Russia’s experience in Beslan and at the Nord Ost theater siege rendered Putin a reliable partner in the Global War on Terror. But in Bush’s second term, the president seemed disabused of this notion. By 2008, he had committed the U.S. to augmenting a ring of anti-missile and radar installations around the former Soviet space, presided over the enlargement of NATO to include the Baltics, Bulgaria, and Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and drawn down bilateral relations including ending support for Moscow’s bid to join the World Trade Organization.
Barack Obama inherited these conditions as well as a Russian act of aggression against neighboring Georgia. But, in operating on their own misapprehension that Moscow’s provocative behavior was an response to Bush-era unilateralism, the 44th president and his administration went on a charm offensive. Obama scrapped Bush’s missile-defense plans for Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for illusory promises from Moscow to help curtail Iran’s nuclear program. He committed the United States and Russia to a variety of Cold War–style arms treaties, which were observed primarily by the United States alone. He abandoned Bush’s hostility toward Russia’s WTO bid, and Russian accession followed in 2012. And Obama sanctioned endless summitry that elevated Russia’s position on the world stage.
Why wouldn’t the West assume Russia’s diplomatic and military heft was significant? After all, that’s what the Obama administration kept insisting. On September 10, 2013, in what remains the most confused speech of his presidency, Obama made the case for intervention in the Syrian civil war consistent with his own self-set “red line.” But in that same speech, Obama also insisted Russia had rescued America from having to make good on its promises.
Moscow would relieve Syria of its chemical-weapons stockpiles, the White House promised. But this deal only proved cover to Moscow as it intervened with the West’s support in a mission designed only to ensure Russia’s blood-soaked satrap in Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, remined in power. Russia’s intervention in that crisis only forestalled America’s own unavoidable intervention in that war to preserve its imperiled interests in the Northern Levant (a conflict that became markedly more dangerous given the presence of Russian assets in theater). Still, Obama held fast to the delusion that Russia could be made into a partner for peace in Syria, which endured into the final year of his presidency.
Twenty-thirteen was also the year in which the last American tank units were withdrawn from European soil for the first time since World War II. Relatedly, the following year, Russia invaded Ukraine following a popular revolt against a government in Kyiv dead-set on ignoring parliamentary efforts to integrate Ukraine into the European Union. The invasion surprised the White House, but Obama’s hostility toward Russia’s landgrab probably surprised the Kremlin, too. After all, the Obama State Department’s unstated policy vis-à-vis Ukraine’s aspirations to integrate with Europe was, crassly stated, “f*** the E.U.” And when the Obama White House couldn’t muster more support for Ukraine than a dispatch of night-vision goggles, it likely confirmed for Putin the wisdom of the risks he had decided to court.
By the time Trump came into office, Democratic Obama-era acolytes were convinced not just of the efficacy of Russian hard power but the omnipotence of its intelligence services. They knew that Russia’s efforts to probe and expose the emails of Clinton campaign officials and Democratic intelligence-committee representatives had a material effect on the outcome of the 2016 election. They knew Russian-bought Facebook memes advanced Republican prospects in ill-defined but still measurable ways. They knew that Trump’s inexplicable obsequiousness toward Putin was the quo for which there must have been a quid. They convinced themselves of Russia’s unseen but near omnipresent influence.
Rejoining the historical narrative, Rothkopf maintains that Joe Biden entered office with “no illusions” about Putin. “No president since Putin took office has had a clearer read on the Russian leader than Biden,” he adds. The lowness of this bar notwithstanding, it’s a hurdle Biden still cannot clear. Whereas the Trump administration paired light presidential rhetoric with tough policy toward Russia, the Biden administration coupled rhetorical hostility toward Moscow from the president with a policy of reproachment.
By early 2021, analysts feared that Biden’s pursuit of a “stable and predictable” Russo-American détente amounted to “sleepwalking into a reset with Russia.” There was more summitry, more arms treaties, perfunctory punishments for brazen violations of U.S. law (such as the “Solar Winds” cyberattack), and relief on sanctioned projects such as the Nord Stream II pipeline. Only when Putin rewarded Biden’s displays of weakness in Europe and Central Asia with a second invasion of Ukraine did Biden wise up to the nature of the threat posed by Moscow.
Why were the expert classes beguiled by Russia’s efforts to modernize its military to such an extent that we thought Moscow’s latest assault on Ukraine would be a cake walk? It was not, as Rothkopf suggests, because the ruthless capitalist enterprise pulled the wool over our eyes — in his telling, the “defense contractors and military leaders who depend on formidable enemies to help them pass the massive defense budgets to which they have become addicted.” It’s because of how the Obama-era political class responded to it with a mixture of vocal apprehension and superficial efforts to hem Russia inside its borders. It’s true that little spadework was done to dispel the public of this flawed estimation of Russia’s military strength in the Trump years, but it was nonetheless an inherited condition.
Rothkopf does not mean to suggest that Putin is not a threat to Western interests. But this, he maintains, is a different Putin. He is “older, more paranoid, and significantly diminished.” Well, he is older, and he is diminished — though the stature he once enjoyed has been gifted by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. But this is still the same guy who had Anna Politkovskaya killed in 2006 and Boris Nemtsov murdered in 2015. It’s the same guy who helped raze Grozny and Aleppo to the ground in 2000 and 2016, respectively. It’s the same guy who executed cyberattacks against NATO allies in 2007 and cross-border raids in 2014. It’s the same guy who facilitated genocide in Syria, shields Iran’s nuclear program, and who fields pirate armies all over the globe to pillage the landscape.
Rothkopf recognized the Russian threat for what it was at the time, and he saw Obama’s response to it as insufficient. After all, the author denounced Obama’s 2015 U.N. address in which the president called Russia’s actions out of step with the tides of history as, “Cupcakes. Unicorns. Rainbows. Putin is mean.” Rothkopf is right to warn of our tendency to “overstate” Russia’s capabilities. But in misdiagnosing the causes of this malady, we’re only likely to continue to suffer from it for the foreseeable future.
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